MoreSwiss Background:

In a Round-Robin format each player competes head-to-head with every other player in the tournament. A Swiss-system has traditionally been used when too many entrants were participating in a tournament for a true round-robin to have been feasible. In both formats no one is eliminated, rather every participant plays the same number of matches. The winners are the player(s) with the best win-loss record. In the past, Backgammon tournaments in the United States used a modified Swiss-system wherein after a certain number of rounds they moved the players with the best win-loss records into a single elimination knockout bracket. “MoreSwiss” refers to a format that has been developed over the years for backgammon tournaments where players are eliminated after a certain number of losses, most commonly four. Swiss rounds continue until there is only one player remaining with fewer than three losses. That person is the winner while all players remaining with three losses place in the tournament. MoreSwiss.com was created by Rory Pascar, organizer of the Chicago Open Backgammon Tournament, 2009 – Present. Before this web application was created a manual draw was done using index cards with each player’s name and opponents listed round by round. It was an extremely tedious process that created much deadtime between the end of one round and the start of the next. Moreswiss.com is fast and efficient while greatly reducing the amount of deadtime between rounds. If you are interested in using this application for your tournament, please email info@moreswiss.com.

Pairing Rules:

The algorithms that power MoreSwiss.com were developed with the following pairing rules hierarchy…

• No player can receive a second bye until all remaining players have had at least one bye
• Byes are awarded to a player with the worst possible record
• Players will be paired against players with as similar a record as possible
• Players will be paired against players they have not played in a previous round
• If a player has played a previous round against an opponent with a better record, they will not be paired against a player with a better record again
• If a player has played a previous round against an opponent with a worse record, they will not be paired against a player with a worse record again

As the number of remaining players decrease, the pairing rules become harder to enforce and are relaxed from the bottom up.